once i get access to a mig (or get around to fixing mine, if possible) i’m going to weld a box around the tailpipe with a couple hose fittings on it, and hook that up to a y-mixer, one side from the hotbox and the other to ambient air, add a thermistor to the outlet to adjust the mix ratio so i don’t get air hotter than 120 or so (thats what water heaters are set to to prevent burns) and add that into the air system. thats a great idea!

youre using a flamethrower to do the job of a flyswatter. a flamethrower has more power, but a flyswatter won’t burn your house down. choose the right tool for the job

used a propane space heater (the ones that mount on the little bottle you use camping) to heat my truck when it was -5f once

Also had a coworker that made something like this 15 years ago when he heard me talking about my Honda. What he did, though, was to use little 12V heating elements (kinda like 4″x8″ heating pads) that came out of military battery packs. He wired them to the car’s 12V system with a dashboard switch and put a thermal switch in the vent before the heating pads to shut them off when the incoming air got to something like 100 degrees.

Worked great! The heating elements could not get hot enough to damage anything since they were designed to go up against batteries in a plastic enclosure, but got plenty warm enough to get his big old Ford LTD warm right away in Michigan winters.

Hot, fresh, on the go toast.

Now THAT’S engineering!

Of course with the toaster/heater combo you’d also have the side effect of making the entire car smell like whatever you were toasting. It could be a huge plus for older cars that smell, well, “broken-in”. I know i’d take “brown sugar and cinnamon” over “mildew and road-tar” anyday.

The foreman grill de-icer, I’m not sure how you’d do that; does the heating element come out of those? It might be best kept intact as a roof-top unit that allows hot grease to drip-down and de-ice the windshield (wet-naps not included) while your breakfast sausages cook.

and you guys (gals) call yourselves hackers. you should be ashamed. ashamed, I say.

perhaps you don’t know the retail products are basically the same thing. they’ve sold electric car heaters for many years, it’s not new. or that not everbody desires to wake up 45 minutes early to allow their car to thaw out before they can go to work. or that old vw’s used _gas-fired_ heaters, but your parents survived to have you.

it’s a cool hack. get over the website.

and be sure to have parental supervision before you make some pop-tarts…